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Sidebar: Five Ways To Take Action
Sidebar: Origins Of he Standardized Exam

No More Tests! Challenging Standardized Education
By Bill Wetzel
Issue 115, November/December 2002

Take out your number two pencils, boys and girls-standardized testing season is upon us once again. Children's backpacks will be bursting with test-prep guides and practice exams, classroom calendars will be counting down until the big day, and parents will anxiously await that letter in the mail to find out if their children can advance into the next grade. Thanks to our country's renewed dedication to "high standards and accountability," our children's education has been turned into a stressful marathon of boredom, superficial thinking, and of course, filling in the blanks.

Few education "experts" seem interested in taking the advice of Albert Einstein, who warned that, "not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts." In fact, our nation is busier than ever making sure that there is a number attached to every child who walks through the schoolhouse gates. In Massachusetts, the 17-hour MCAS exam is longer than the Massachusetts Bar Exam. California's Standford 9 exams require children as young as seven to sit through as many as ten days of multiple-choice testing. Recently, a second grader from south San Francisco's Martin Elementary School got so nervous about taking the Stanford 9s that he threw up on his exam.

The Growing Movement against the Tests
Change is on the horizon. The testing takeover of our schools has precipitated a wide variety of spirited actions that are only the beginning of grassroots mobilization for real education. For instance, look at the moms from Scarsdale, New York, who kept two-thirds of their eighth graders home from school last spring to stage a boycott against the state science exams. "We're driving them out of the school and bringing them home or to a house where there's a babysitter," said Debby Rapaport, one of the main parent organizers.

That same spring, more than 1,800 students, teachers, and parents traveled in school buses from New York City to the state capitol building in Albany in what was the biggest demonstration against high-stakes tests to date. Most of the participants came from a network of 28 public alternative schools, which are to this day being forced to do away with their creative, innovative, and community-based approach to learning and adopt a lockstep curriculum in order to prepare for New York state's required exam, the Regents. The organizing committee, known as the Parents' Coalition to Stop High-Stakes Testing, is now suing the state of New York for virtually shutting down their 28 public schools, which had far higher college acceptance rates and far lower dropout rates than any of the city schools that followed the Regents curriculum.

In Boulder, Colorado, 180 freshmen and sophomore high school students took it upon themselves to speak out against the tests. After agreeing to take their CSAPs, they exited the building, put on their anti-testing costumes, and held an after-school press conference. Sophomore Amanda Parsons declared to the media that "standardized tests equal standardized students."

Across the nation, local networks of activists are taking creative actions against the testing takeover. Some states are even inviting their elected representatives and media members to take the examinations along with the students and see how they do. In West Bend, Wisconsin, 30 business leaders agreed to take a shortened version of the state's proposed graduation exam, leading one bank executive to say, "I think it's good to challenge students, but not like this." Others are confronting the corporations, such as McGraw-Hill and ETS, who are directly profiting from the increases in standardized testing. National networks such as Students Against Testing and Fair Test are providing support, materials, contacts, and advice to those who want to get involved. With more and more test booklets and answer keys coming our children's way, many are convinced we have only seen the beginning of this movement.

Beyond the Bubbles: Learning without Testing
There is an imaginative, dynamic, and nurturing world beyond standardized testing waiting to take shape. The first question any testing critic is likely to be asked is, "Well, what do you do when you take away the tests?" The easy (and perhaps most accurate) answer is: "start learning." But thanks to a near century of standardizing the education system, few schools actually know where to begin.

Upon accepting her award as the 2001 Teacher of the Year at a White House ceremony, Michele Forman remarked, "Learning and teaching is messy stuff. It doesn't fit into bubbles. I don't think a simple pencil-and-paper test is going to capture what students know and can do." Networks of innovative schools are developing methods of assessment that not only allow others to see what a student is learning but even motivate kids to keep at it.

One common method of observing a student's progress without assigning them a test score is the use of portfolios. A Portfolio is a detailed collection of work that allows the student, teacher, and parent to witness how the student's thoughts and work ethic evolve over the months or years. Similarly, at many schools, students display their projects at exhibitions or "learning fairs." Participants get the opportunity to look at each other's work, ask questions, and then use what they've learned to continue their own educational journey.

Yet the deeper issue here is not, "How can we best assess students?" but "How can we provide the best nurturing learning environment?" When the standardized curriculum leaves the school, the bumper sticker finally becomes true: the world is your classroom. In the words of Grace Llewellyn, who recently wrote the book Guerilla Learning¸ "In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it, and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself." This might not be the best quote to give to your local school board, but it's still a powerful statement in a time when schools assume that learning is something that is only done to students, not with students, let alone by students.

What exactly would students do without standardized tests? Here are a few ideas: write their own autobiographies, start a garden at their school, interview their community members, create their own inventions, hold political debates, read the newspaper, keep a journal, go to a museum, start a book discussion group, or even create their own classes based on their common interests-all the things that no test could ever do for them. In general, the more creativity and student participation that can be added to the highly un-creative standardized curriculum, the better.

Never before have children been so well numbered, ranked, analyzed, dissected, and sorted. Never before have children also been so disconnected, bored, and alienated from their own natural ability to learn. Bill Goodling, the ex-chair of Clinton's House Education Committee explains that, "If more testing was the answer to the problems in our schools, testing would have solved them a long time ago." We must decide if we want our schools to be mental processing factories of frustration, fear, and national percentiles, or centers of inquiry, hope, and learning. A brave journey is underway to create a school system where children will never spend their lives filling in other people's blanks.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Books

Kohn, Alfie. The Case against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools. Heinemann, 2000.

Meier, Deborah. Will Standards Save Public Education? A New Democracy Forum with Linda Nathan, Abigail Thernstrom, and Others. Beacon Press, 2000.

Miner, Barbara and Kathy Swope, eds. Failing Our Kids: Why the Testing Craze Won't Fix Our Schools. Rethinking Schools Ltd, 2000.

Ohanian, Susan. One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards. Heinemann, 1999.

Sacks, Peter. Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It. Perseus Books, 2001.

Children's Books
Doctor Seuss, Jack Prelutsky, and Lane Smith. Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! Knopf, 1998.

Finchler, Judy. Testing Miss Malarkey. Walker & Co, 2000.

Organizations
Fair Test
342 Broadway
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-864-4810
info@fairtest.org
www.fairtest.org

Rethinking Schools
1001 E. Keefe Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53212
800-669-4192
www.rethinkingschools.org

Students Against Testing
615 Little Silver Point Road
Little Silver, New Jersey 07739
732-530-1128
info@nomoretests.com
www.NoMoreTests.com

For additional information on testing, see the following articles in past issues of Mothering: "The Children Left Behind," no. 108 and "Achievement Testing," no. 61.

Bill Wetzel, 22, is the founder of Students Against Testing and a student at New York University. Over the last three years, he has traveled on his bike around the country, living with various families while visiting schools, conferences, and organizations. He is the author of the upcoming book School Daze.